Then again, the wave of indignation provoked by sexual bullying may not have had a lot of impact on fans of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and the movies made from it.

The thesis behind its popularity doesn't bear too much examination, but here goes. It seems that sexual bullies can be reformed but it's worth trying only if they're fabulously rich, handsome, successful and prepared to devote large chunks of their money to the pursuit of your happiness – when you're not in handcuffs.

In Fifty Shades Freed, the story's "climactic chapter", its S&M twist hasn't been completely abandoned but accommodations have been made. Ana (Dakota Johnson) and Christian (Jamie Dornan​) are now married and soon to move into a new home – a neo-Gothic mansion lending itself to unfortunate comparisons with Bluebeard's Castle.

For the time being, however, they are installed in Christian's penthouse, where they are still making regular visits to the Red Room with its chains, manacles and inventive assortment of sex toys, but Christian's tastes have changed.

In the last movie, after opening up about his traumatic childhood and his birth mother's death from a drug overdose, he admitted to being a sadist hooked on punishing women who looked like her. With this confession out of the way, it seems that he lost the urge to hurt. Well, almost.

The word "spank" is still part of the Greys' language of love but his technique has been adjusted accordingly. Ana has also learnt how to tease and talk back. She's now playmate rather than submissive, a transition Johnson negotiates quite artfully.

Maybe she's been doing these movies for so long that familiarity has bred irreverence because she now seems to be dwelling permanently on their funny side. And she's right, for they've now lost any edge they may once have had and turned into exercises in high camp.

She certainly makes droll work of dealing with her husband's tantrums and bouts of bossiness, leaving poor Dornan cast as the shapely but boring butt of the joke. As the new, improved, tenderly romantic Christian, he's not only burdened with the film's most risible lines, he's also required to sing, something he does so badly that a large proportion of the audience at this week's preview burst out laughing.

The screenwriter, James' partner Niall Leonard, doesn't quite know what to do with him. The loving couple have a couple of spats. Christian is not happy about Ana's reluctance to use her married name in her publishing job and he can't handle the news that she's pregnant. After all, a child will be competing with him for her attention, and he can't have that. Otherwise, for the film's first half, the mantra is: when in doubt, write a sex scene.

There are a lot of them. They take place in a variety of settings and as usual, they're shot in breathless close-up. One, played out in the kitchen, has the lovers exploring the erotic potential to be found in licking yoghurt off one another. Then, in the second half, the action takes a new course and a cack-handed attempt at a thriller begins to take shape.

Ana's former boss, Jack Hyde (Eric Johnson), is on the loose after being fired for attacking her and, it seems, he's out for vengeance – a subplot that involves a car chase, a bombing, a kidnapping and some very clunky manoeuvring with a bag of ransom money.

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These are all desperation measures, dreamed up to pad out the run-up to the inevitable happy ending, and it's clear that the director, James Foley, is just going through the motions.

This instalment was shot at the same time as the last one, Fifty Shades Darker, and the strain shows. It limps to a finish and when it's over, I imagine that no one is happier to see the end than its two stars.

Sandra Hall is the author of two novels (A Thousand Small Wishes and Beyond the Break), two histories of the Australian television industry (Supertoy and Turning On, Turning Off) and Tabloid Man, a biography of Ezra Norton, the man who established Truth and The Daily Mirror. She was film critic at The Bulletin magazine prior to joining The Sydney Morning Herald in 1996.